Book Spotlight: Faithfully Dissident Daughters by Chelsea Kim Long
Faithfully Dissident Daughters: Reclaiming Christian Womanhood Beyond Patriarchy (Westminster John Knox Press, September 8, 2026), with a foreword by Dr. Christena Cleveland. Available in paperback.
It's part memoir, part theology. Most women I know were handed some version of the same script: be agreeable, be available, want less, and put yourself last and call it love. I got the religious edition. I grew up conservative Christian culture, and the script I was given came to me seemingly co-signed by God, which made it very hard to argue with.
Then my life stopped fitting the script. A traumatic first birth and a host of reproductive trauma, a marriage that needed to reckon with who held the power and whose time was valuable, and a faith I couldn't force back into its old shape.
The book is about what I found when I went looking for the parts of that tradition that had room for women in them. They were there. Buried, not lost.
It's for any woman who inherited a version of herself she didn't choose and is trying to work out what's actually hers.
If you are mid-divorce, you are being asked to make an enormous number of consequential decisions while possibly carrying beliefs or even being told straight up that your own instincts can't be trusted.
Most women I know have some version of that lack of self trust. You've been talked out of what you saw, told you were overreacting or too sensitive. For those raised religious, it came with Bible verses attached, so the self-distrust wasn't a bad habit. It was obedience.
Before you answer the next message from your lawyer or ex, put your feet flat on the floor and breathe out longer than in. Then ask yourself what you want, before what's reasonable. You know what to do.
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